Password protect

souvik · 05-22-2001, 05:28 AM

Is it possible to password protect a file that I want to ?
By this I mean that when anybody is going to view the file (whatever be the way he choose) it will ask for a password and if valid password is entered it will allow.
If any body found any hints or any suitable link just help me.

manolakis · 11-06-2015, 09:19 AM

I am not the best linux engineer but I believe that you can do that by using the chown command.
Chown is used to change the ownership of a file or directory to a specific user. In your case you can

Quote:

chown root file

which will give the ownership of the file to the superuser. Setting the case that your file is a textfile you can view this file using the following command

Quote:

sudo cat file

When you execute this command you will be prompted for the root password in order to view the file.

Hope this helps.

Habitual · 11-06-2015, 10:30 AM

Depends where this file is.
chown root <file> works as manolakis has said.

Being able to see there is a file at say /home/souvik/secret
does not mean that user fred can open it, read it, or anything other than "see" the file where it is at.

NevemTeve · 11-06-2015, 01:35 PM

Well, what platform? BS2000, for example, supports file-passwords (3pwd/file: read/write/execute), but it won't ask for it: if you have specified the password before the operation you can read/write/execute the file, otherwise not.